Against Telephone Etiquette, Hang Up on Fake Phone Job Offers that Don’t Hire You but Want to Scrapping for Your Info
I have had it!
I have had it with inconsiderate, out of town, LYING people who call to tell me about a job offer that I am not qualified for and that I am pretty sure is part of a new type of telemarketing scam.
For years, we’ve been told “be nice” and “they are just trying to do their job” or “why would you turn down any job offer given to you?”.
And yeah, we should be nicer and kinder to people…but there are exceptions, which is why I am taking my time out of my busy schedule to release the new rules of which I and other should use to turn down any phone call because if you haven’t figured out why that “nice guy” on the phone calling you from “Atlanta” or “New Jersey” (companies like this CAN buy phone numbers in other parts of the country OR THE WORLD to make it seem like they in America, when they aren’t. This is one of the flaws with IP Telephony.)
Here are the list of things thing that will make me hang up on you within the first 30 seconds:
You aren’t local
On Twitter, I pinned this to my profile.
And look at that date! December 9th! I’ve had this tweet pinned for nearly a year now and yet ever week, some guy with a South Asian accent on an out-of-state phone number from some recruiting firm I’ve never heard of still calls me up.
There is this small group of folks at the co-working space I’ve been hanging out at who are of South Asian descent who speak with excellent English including this lovely woman who speaks with beautiful diction and a Queen’s English accent.
But I don’t get phone calls from people who speak like them. I get phone calls who sound like it is 3 AM, they ran out of coffee, and have an accent that would motivate other South Asian folks to report a microaggression because you would think the person on the other end of the line was talking in an offensive accent.
I did see Sorry To Bother You over Thanksgiving break, which is a film that is a lot more surreal that the marketing lead us to believe. Regardless, it is a sharp social commentary of race, class, wage slavery, how people treat you on the phone based on your voice, and some how horses.
Keep in mind this section is called “You are not local” not “You aren’t American” or “You don’t speaking with your ‘white voice’” That would be wrong! You could speak with whatever accent you want…so as long as you do it within the yellow area on this map and you have a phone number that starts with the following area codes in blue.
The Job Offer You Have Is Shady AF
I find it odd that many of these “job recruiters” don’t do background checks on the people they are calling first…you know to see how much of an income they currently make. (Let me answer that in regards to my current situation: NONE!)
It’s bad enough they don’t even bother to read my resume. (More on that in a bit.) However, there is a creep factor at work when I find out that you found my resume on a site that I didn’t post it to or at very least obtained it from some other job aggregater other than Zip Recruiter.
These are the people who don’t get resumes to find people jobs. These are the people who used some program to scrape for information, including resume and personal data, to sell your data under the pretext that they found a job for you.
The program scrapes for resumes based on matching keywords like a bad search engine. And unlike how you would use refining filters on most jobs websites to narrow your search results, the “recruiter” just takes whatever matches the list of keywords, most of which do not have anything to do with the job you are looking for. It’s not because they are bad at it. They just don’t care.
Hackers do this this all the time through the process of social engineering.
Social engineering doesn’t require a computer at all. It’s all about confidence, and a story that they can weave to sound as believable as possible that they can stick with and sell to get the deal done.
Most of these big data breaches don’t involve being in front of a computer, but in front of a person who doesn’t give a damn, is only there for the money, or who can be easily manipulated.
The video game Overwatch, whose hacker character Sombra, brought forth a true adage that has been around for years: “Everything can be hacked…and everyone.” Chances are, you’ve already been hacked.
Oh, well!
You LITERALLY Didn’t Read My Resume
I recently got a call about a job offer for Mastercard in O’Fallon, Missouri. Mastercard has been on my radar for year, even if St. Charles County refuses to get a public transit system, but that is a discussion for another post.
I asked what were the skills they were looking for. He said Java and Hadoop.
Java is almost legacy at this point. But like a nicotine addiction, not every company can quit this awful language that they built their business around decades ago.
A more modern approach is of course Python or Node.js if you want to be the kind of person who is on the bleeding edge of things.
And Hadoop…I’ve never touched a book on Hadoop in my life.
How some folks have picked up on these obscure languages and frame works and implemented them into their business feels like either a niche thing or these people came from another dimension where functional programming was taught years ago instead of object-oriented programming like any real developer.
And before I here “we’ll maybe your resume is terrible” or “you spend way too much time on social media”, those factors are trivial.
Firstly, it helps to go to career fairs where there is someone who can freely audit your resume for spelling, grammar, and content. If they say it is a bad resume, rewrite it. If they say something like “this is a good format” you can keep using that resume and thanks to computers update easily without having to rewrite it over and over again.
Secondly, social media isn’t looked at as much anymore. Social media brings out the worst in people, especially if politics are involved. Unless you are making money in social media (i.e. your name is Mark Fischbach) or have literally made an ass out of yourself online to a large enough audience, or did something offensive and never atoned for it with a sincere apology and a call to action to do better, recruiters and employers have no reason to deep dive into your social media.
You are inconsiderate!
I’m likely going to get a lot of flack about this post, but whatever crap I’m about to get because things were taken out of context is tolerable compared to the most egregious of sins of telemarketing — oh, did I say “fishing for information using telemarket”? I mean “Offering jobs to people”. What was I thinking. Oh, there I go again with describing what it really is. Because if we come up with a different name for it, the jig would be up.
But he’re what really pisses me off: You call at 10 AM on a Monday…when I am in a meeting. You call me at 4 PM, when I’m just about to walk out the door for the day. It’s never a good time to make this call because it’s less of a job offer and more of a sales pitch.
You DON’T Have a Job Offer or The Job You Offered Is Run By People Who Suck.
It shouldn’t be that hard for a company to post a job offer on line. And any large company that doesn’t do it because it is too expensive doesn’t deserve the time of day. (What is the point of posting jobs if you are afraid to spend money?!)
However, we live in an age where large companies are losing money every day because they hired a friend instead of somebody who know what they are doing, or they posted a job where they seldom pay their employees…which is illegal even if you claim it to be “100% part-time commission” and handle all their data.
Unfortunately, these con-artists exist too.
Personally, I’m sick of these jerks being in businesses that are typically in the startup industry. It makes failing in startups look bad, and it makes startup sectors look even worse.
People want to say “your too opinionated/biased/picky/fickle” up until you get the job and you find out it isn’t paying anything.
That upward mobility you had hoped for with gainful employment was a rouse all along.
And the past two years for me have been far from kind. Which is why I’ve been quite an icy person when it comes to the subject of looking for work, especially after being told “you should stay for the (bad) experience.”
Jobs are not supposed to be bad experiences. They aren’t supposed to make you bitter. And looking for them shouldn’t make you a less sociable person.
Unfortunately, there are people out there who can do this.
You Won’t Meet In Person First
Doesn’t it make sense to meet the people helping you find work?
USA Today wrote about how employers who set up an interview with potential hires and they never show up or they hire somebody and never show up. Never mind that the employers (and recruiters) had been doing that people looking for work years before the word “ghosting” was entered into our vernacular.
Meeting in person offers an assurance that a job may be possible, and if there isn’t one, it assures that you just didn’t communicate with strangers especially if your personal information got involved (which it shouldn’t unless there are papers to sign.)
The home office is “1060 West Addison Street, Chicago, Illinois”
Don’t get me wrong. The company I am at is at a co-working space that borrows the space’s address. However, this past week I got a call from someone who had a zip code in the part of town with vacant buildings and no record of any companies there.
It was a P.O. Box. That’s the shady part.
Another thing you need to do is a reverse telephone look up. There’s a good chance that phone number has a few people reports.
You accused me of LYING on my resume!
Here it is now, May 2019. Since I last updated this article in November 2018, I have continued to look for work.
However, one recruiter in particular dissed my resume so hard, she claimed that of the past five years I had worked, only ONE of those years counted as professional work experience.
She though I was lying on my resume.
The discrimination of ANY kind of work into calling it a “hobby”, “independent”, “contracted”, and “freelance” then to discredit all of it for the one “professional” job wasn’t even a “professional job” to begin with, shows just how ignorant many corporate recruiters are.
Do you think I am sitting alone at my home writing a bunch of code and not getting paid to do it for my health?!
WORK IS WORK! There are people taking sh*tty fry cook job at McDonald's in hopes that it counts towards some work experience only to get turned down for a better job because to them frying hamburgers isn’t the same as writing the next killer app. The fry cook could be in his or her garage on the weekend tinkering with functional programming who will never get the job because on their resume they have “functional programming” in their Skills section but the jerks at Aerotek (yeah, it was them!) only see they’ve worked at McDonald's the past few years. Sorry that Google, Microsoft, and Apple weren’t knocking down the door at my Midwestern home.
So much for upward mobility!
Conclusion
There’s probably a list of other things I may have forgot to look out for from jobs that promise “work-from-home” to “asking you for money”. But these should be easy to identify red flags.
I will add them to this post if I can think of them, or if you know of any, leave a comment below.
Thank you for reading this post.
